Holmes Family

The Holmes Family is a well-to-do family of country squires, originating in Yorkshire in England. Their most famous son was the detective Sherlock Holmes, who discusses his family background in the story "The Greek Interpreter" by Dr. John Watson and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Philip José Farmer makes the Holmeses a major branch of the Wold Newton Family in Tarzan Alive, having identified Dr. Siger Holmes and his wife Violet as having been present at the Wold Newton Meteorite strike. Their descendents exhibited extraordinary abilities (such as Sherlock Holmes's great powers of deductive reasons), as did those of the other witnesses of the event, as a result of ionizing radiation released at the moment of the strike.

Sherlockian scholars have traced a definite Scandinavian element in the ancestry of the Holmes family (for example, in the name "Siger"), and indeed the name "Holmes" itself seems to derive from a Scandinavian word for "island."